An examination of reflective teaching tools used by instructors in Turkey

Teacher Development (TD) is recently one of the most popular topics among education faculties and teaching departments' curriculums all over the world. Reflective teaching is one of the most prominent methods in TD. Considering these recent developments about teaching, the purpose of this study is to identify which reflective tools are commonly used by instructors at preparation schools of both private and public Turkish Universities. It is known that despite the pre-service and in-service programs, and university courses, there is a lack of detailed information about reflective teaching and its application in the classrooms. One of the most popular methods in teacher development is reflective teaching (RT). Reflective teaching was firstly appeared with John Dewey. In the 1930s, John Dewey defined reflection as a proactive, ongoing, examination of beliefs and practices, their origins and their impacts (Stanley 1998). According to Dewey (1993), the purpose of reflective practice is to change teachers' actions and decisions and how it impacts the outcomes of those decisions. Since it firstly came on the stage, it has evolved a lot but it is still very effective and it will continue to be popular because of supporting and guiding a lifelong learning system for its practitioners. Teachers generally believe that professional development is something which is done in a top down way with extrinsic motivation. However, these are mostly trainings which are term based, certificate supplied, topics generally chosen by the authorities, imposed and top down ones. On the other hand, teacher development has a bottom up process; it is optional, and continuous. In the light of these teacher development criteria, reflective teaching tools and procedures seem the most usable techniques to acquire teacher development for every teacher who wants to develop and continue his/her development for lifelong. So in this study, the aim is to know which reflective teaching tools are being used by instructors at universities in Turkey, and identify the most useful and common ones according to the results of the study. Keywords: Teacher development, reflective teaching, reflective teaching tools, foreign language education